This Is Why

I met Kimba three years ago. I walked into the lifeskills classroom at the middle school, and he was moaning and flapping in the corner. I kind of wanted to do the same thing but I didn’t, which meant that the teachers mistook me for a neurotypical like them, which meant that the first thing I got to learn about Kimba was that “he just tried to throw a chair at me.”

I learned a lot of other things about Kimba in the next few days. I couldn’t sit within four feet of him, because he would attack me—he didn’t like anyone except his aide, and he went after her pretty regularly too. He had successfully convinced the teachers for an entire semester that he couldn’t read at all, only to be foiled when they gave him a puzzle of animal names and he completed it perfectly. The only words he said were “NO!”, “BUH-BYE!”, and “ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-FIVE!”, screamed like something was breaking. About a month after I first met him, I learned two more things: he was a foster child, and the previous night he had attempted to beat his foster mother to death and had almost succeeded.

Here’s what I learned about Kimba over the next three years: he is incredibly intellectually gifted. He taught himself to read. He has a system in which he classifies every person he encounters as a different animal based on personality, appearance, relationship and attitude towards him, and the pleasantness of their encounter. He may be autistic, he may have various brain injuries, he might be selectively mute, he definitely had lead poisoning. He uses language obliquely, employing rich and innovative metaphors. He analyzes the symbolism in Disney movies, but his favorite television series is Kimba The White Lion. He taught himself how to use Google. He speed-reads. He spent the first nine years of his life in one of the most horrifically abusive environments my state has on record.

Kimba and I, now, spend most of our time in lifeskills together. We are virtually inseparable. I was the one who proved that he could read far above the level he was assigned. I am the only person he willingly lets touch his speech-generating device when he’s having trouble finding the words. He’s held my hand when I randomly dissociated, and he’s grabbed my phone and texted KIMBA when he thought I was spending too long talking to the White House. When he wants to bang his head, now, he grabs my hands and I squeeze at his ears until he can breathe again. He puts his hands on my head and does the same for me.

For three years, Kimba and I have stood (often literally) hand-in-hand, united, in our very different pain and very different ways, against a world designed to shut us out. I curled around him when he was having flashbacks and he copied my bitch-face and employed it against incompetent substitutes. I foiled his plans and told his general-ed teachers that he could, in fact, read very well, and he tried to teach me how to wink. When I left lifeskills for a while to attempt college I said good-bye and he held on and wouldn’t let go. I came back, defeated. We saw each other again and smiled with mouths that had forgotten how.

I wonder if he got so mad at me for going to Washington because he had overheard what was going to happen next.

While I was sitting in a humid room and watching as people stared at me and explained that the world would be better for everyone if we inconvenient autistics just didn’t exist, plans were being made to put Kimba away. While I was getting job offers for my distilled fury and ability to wax eloquent about how my life sucks, it was being decided that the considerable, unbelievable, overwhelming progress Kimba has made in every respect over the last three years isn’t good enough. While I was staring in disbelief as Geraldine Dawson pontificated about the suffering of “autism families”, people were sitting at tables, sipping stale coffees, and deciding that, since Kimba hasn’t recovered quickly enough from his trauma, he needs to be institutionalized.

It was announced today, and finances should be finalized by next week. On Wednesday, June 22nd, Kimba will complete the seventh grade at the middle school. He will eat an end-of-the-year cupcake that we will make, as he will not be invited to participate with his general-ed class. We will carefully gather up the last of his projects and load them into the same battered backpack he’s had for three years, a backpack that will be thrown away with his projects that night because he won’t need it—any of it—any more. We will pack up his device, the notes we’ll have scribbled to his new staff saying he can read very well, actually, and here is a Kimba-to-English dictionary, you’ll need it if he ever decides to talk to you and the notes we’ll have labored over for him: love you, miss you, you’ve grown up so much, it’s going to be okay. We’ll smile, we’ll lie, we’ll tell him that he will love his new school and that we’ll be allowed to visit.

On Wednesday, June 22nd, we’ll say good-bye and try to memorize what his smile looked like. On Thursday, June 23rd, he’ll disappear into a residential program.

They said they know he loves animals. He can work on their farm.

I now count three kids I know and have worked with who, since December, have been institutionalized. This is three out of ten. Five out of fifteen, if I push the timeline back a year. We incarcerate people because they kill other people, because they rape or because they steal or because they make our world unsafe—and now, apparently, because they are just a little too inconvenient. Funny. You don’t even get a trial when your crime is drooling or not talking, when your sin is PTSD or autism, when the thing you did wrong was being born and then not quite meeting expectations.

You just get put away.

I wanted to tell you about Kimba. I wanted to ask you what I am supposed to do tomorrow morning. I wanted to say that it doesn’t matter that things this wrong aren’t ever supposed to actually happen; they do anyways. I wanted to see if maybe, now, you understood—I don’t write to touch, to inspire, to move people, I write because this happens every day, I write because how are we supposed to keep on, I write because a thirteen year old boy is being taken away.

I wanted to tell you about Kimba, because you have to understand that he underlines everything I say and write. I wanted you to meet him before he’s thrown away like human garbage. I wanted someone to give a damn. I wanted to tell you about Kimba because, because, because…

….because I can’t save this one, because I can’t save him, because we have sixty-two days, because oh god, oh god, I can’t save this one, because I forgot that even this tiny little somewhere-only-we-know only exists because nowhere is safe and nothing is allowed us, because oh, oh, oh. Because they are taking Kimba away.

8 Responses

I am crying. And trying to think of anything to say other than “I am crying for a person I have never met. I am crying for the hurt he will never know we share. I am crying as the world tells me that I can’t feel empathy.”